Most Coders Used to be Women, Not Men (and Men Who Dropped Out of College Now Plunder Everything They Can)
Two weeks ago: GAFAM is Connected to Misogyny, Almost All Founders Divorced
A few hours ago Andy from The Cyber Show published an article about "social history of code" in his ongoing series on "Why I Code", "inspired by Pope Leo XIV's Magnifica Humanitas, and [...] part of my long and ongoing struggle with "Ethics For Hackers"." From his new article:
Did you know that for a decade in the 1960s most of the coders were women? My mother was at IBM in the days when it was all very trendy and fabulous. In Britain that continued the tradition established in Bletchley Park twenty years earlier where there were almost no men in the machine rooms, and that culture itself descended from the telephone operators of the 1930s and 1940s (See Ursula Franklin). How then, did we end up in the late 2020's with a cadre of misogynist tech "bros" running enshitified social media and "AI" companies whose products make non-consensual deepfake porn from images of strangers?See the original for more. █As I wrote in the Times some years ago now, it's quite clear that women avoid STEM because of the sort of people already running it and their desperately sad projects of stalking, voyeurism and coercive control - not because of any capability gap. You have to wonder, if women ran tech would we have Google Glass, spy cameras on every object and face recognition? Or might we have built a more creative, less paranoid, militarised digital world?
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The history of code is important to social justice. The code that runs the world is built on, and sustained by, new modes of misappropriation, colonialism, hegemony, domination and enslavement. It's just not nice to think about that every time you look at your phone, so we all tacitly agree not to talk about it too much. We British are exceptionally good at not asking how the sausage is made (or where the tea comes from).
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The millions of coders who built the digital world you now see earned little more on average than brick-layers, and substantially less than lawyers or doctors of the traditional professional classes. Coders today in 2026 are mainly poor, living precarious lives in places like India and the "global south".
When Bill Gates said in 1980 that "There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." he was not only being sincere but wryly prescient - the people like himself getting rich quickly learned to take the code written by others.
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So much of the digital technology industry is built on government money, public goods from university research, and Free Open Source Software created by individuals. It's been taken by Big Tech in precisely the same way that "AI" is a great land grab on the intellectual labour of the commons.
Interestingly, the lawyers suing Open-AI or Anthropic seem fairly unaware of this history; that the very technology that enabled "AI" in the first place is itself a monument to earlier and greater injustices. If the people are victorious in the courts over Big Tech for the harms of "AI" and "social media" we can only hope it opens the floodgates for further reparations to be sought for older, more egregious accumulated harms.
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The "dotcom" bubble leveraged the unpaid work of a whole generation. Since the 1990s Google ran their global network of servers on code written by unpaid volunteers - via things like Apache, Perl, Python, and so on. Apple built their operating system on BSD, a free operating system created entirely by enthusiasts. Amazon would not exist without Free Software. By a system of acquisitions and buy-outs, big companies entirely owe their existence to people who've laboured elsewhere for other goals, and had their work taken.
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The history of commercial code leading to Big Tech is therefore not just a story of theft but a history of propaganda, buying journalists to write fake reviews, slurs, disinformation, sabotage, regulatory capture, and standards-rigging. These mainly US companies still spend billions on trying to bury, obscure and revise historical truths. They try to create a narrative in which they are the source of industry and innovation rather than feeding upon it. They're also funded by US taxpayers who bail out their project of theft and cultural hegemony.